There is continued demand to improve the performance of wireless (e.g., radio frequency or RF) communication networks. For example, military applications can require multicast transmissions of video information. Multicast transmissions are messages that are transmitted simultaneously to many target nodes from one source node. In contrast, unicast transmissions are point-to-point from node-to-node. The requirements of these multicast transmissions impose significant demands on network capacity and delay in delivery.
One way to improve network capacity is to use network communication nodes that have multiple transceivers, or a multi-transceiver system. A multi-transceiver system often involves a dedicated signaling channel and N≧1 data channels. All nodes of the system typically assign the same signaling channel, which is intended for control packets. If a node has more than one data link to its next-hop target, it may use the channel with the highest signal-to-interference noise ratio (SINR) or the next idle channel. However, one issue with present multi-transceiver systems is that they typically focus solely on unicast message traffic and do not accommodate broadcast or multicast traffic. Broadcast traffic refers to transmitting information received by every node on the network. Multicast traffic refers to transmitting information to multiple nodes on the network simultaneously, but to less than all nodes. For systems with protocols that do accommodate broadcast traffic, the broadcast traffic is typically sent using the dedicated signaling channel or control channel. This can limit the scalability of the network and reduce efficiency of network node use.
Thus there are general needs for systems and methods that improve communication network throughput and reduce communication delay while improving network robustness.